Supporting Students at Scale: Profiling Student Behaviors on Usage and Impact of the Student Support System

Flexible, competency-based learning in large, high-workload undergraduate CS courses provide students options to leverage time, instructors, and other course resources for individualized learning. However, at scale the wide range of resources can overwhelm students and instead create impersonal classrooms. We describe our experiences with a structured student support system that helps students navigate learning in a large CS2 course. This study extends prior work on automated, flexible assignment extensions and introduces a structured approach to scheduling student support meetings, where staff suggest specific assignment work plans and course resources with individual students. Our work-in-progress findings suggest that student support meetings create otherwise missing channels of communications within the large class. We introduce a comprehensive profiling approach based on student support system usage to characterize the background and work patterns of students and how they leverage larger framework of course resources available. This work invites further discussion to understand the complex interactions between undergraduate student learning and adequate course support.